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June 5, 2025 - Lionel Nation
46:14
You’ve Never Heard Colonel Douglas Macgregor Like This Before—Absolute Must Watch
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My friends, our guest today is Colonel Douglas McGregor.
Ladies and gentlemen, patriots and truth seekers alike, we are privileged beyond measure today.
If you are unfamiliar with our guest, if the name Colonel Douglas McGregor does not immediately come to mind and summon respect and clarity and fearless gander, then I can only assume that you've been in a coma or exiled to some parallel universe.
This man is not just a decorated combat veteran.
Military strategist and author, he is one of the most, perhaps the only, incisive minds of our time.
A voice of sanity in a world often ruled by psychotic schizoid noise.
Colonel McGregor has shaped not only battlefield doctrine, but the very conversation around America's role in the world.
He's been tested in war, trusted in policy, and revered.
By all who value truth, strength, and unflinching integrity.
His full and extensive biography and curriculum, Vitae, a testament to a lifetime of distinguished service and insight, is available in the description below for those who want to fully appreciate the depth and breadth of his accomplishments.
But in the interest of time and in recognition of the immense value of his presence, let us get straight to it.
Colonel Douglas McGregor.
It is an honor beyond expatiation, sir, to welcome you, and thank you for joining us.
Sure, absolutely.
Happy to be here.
First question, I must ask you this.
How are we doing on the information battlefield, and what role, if any, does the American public play in understanding it?
Describe what you mean by information battlefield.
Well, because right now what we're seeing is there's misinformation, disinformation, that information.
It depends where I go.
You provide a laser clarity that you don't hear anyplace else.
So if nobody hears what you're saying, they don't know what the truth is.
So what is our role in finding out what the truth is?
Well, I would argue that we really confront chaos media today.
The media in the West is entirely in the hands of billionaires who have agendas and are determined that these agendas will be successful.
That ranges from the war in Ukraine to what's happening in the Middle East to alleged Chinese aggression and our war with China and all this sort of business.
That's simply a fact of life.
Now, there's some good news here, and that's called the alternative media.
There are lots of people out there in the alternative media who are trying to do exactly what you just described, identify the truth and get it to the population that's willing to listen to it.
I think we have an aging group of boomers who are probably beyond reaching when it comes to the truth.
They are comfortable with what they're being told because it reflects no change in their universe.
But once you get below the boomer level, you start talking to people in their early 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s.
It's a different ballgame.
And I think most people in those categories...
And so people like you and many others have an opportunity to fill in the blanks that are left by the mainstream media.
I think what we need, and this is something that I've been trying to work on, is something referred to as authority media.
Back in the mid-60s, when I was growing up, I remember vividly these people called Hundley Brinkley and Walter Contrite and so forth.
And I remember that once it became abundantly clear that everything the administration had been telling people about Vietnam was false, and that was really a a consequence of the Tet Offensive.
Right, right.
Completely undermined the mountain of lies that had been given us.
Walter Conkride came on and said, it's effectively time to leave.
This war is a failure.
It doesn't make any sense.
There are no attainable objectives.
It's time for the United States to chart Well, when he said that, Lyndon Johnson said, oh, my God, we've lost the war.
We've lost Walter Cronkite.
I've lost Middle America if I've lost Walter Cronkite.
Yes.
So, you know, here we are.
Where's Walter Cronkite?
Well, he's, you know, he's not even in cold storage.
He's dead and buried.
There's nothing like it today.
So when you turn on Fox and Friends or you turn on MSNBC or CNN, it doesn't matter.
It's all the same.
And you're getting different versions of it.
And a lot of it has just become, as you know, Lionel, entertainment.
You know, Colonel, first, I don't want to, in any way, believe me, I'm not into puffery.
Trust me, I'm a trial lawyer and I just don't, nothing impresses me.
I cannot think, I cannot think I've interviewed a lot of people.
I've been doing this since 1988 when talk radio was in its nascent latter-day version of this.
I've talked to a lot of people.
I cannot think of anybody that I ever spoke to, first of all, that I was this excited to speak with, but who was of a military background, who has engendered this fandom, not because you're this groovy cat, but this perspective that you're given.
Tolstoy said history would be a wonderful thing if only it were true.
I missed the Vietnam War by this much.
And I thought, thank God we got that out of the way.
We're not going to be doing that again.
That was stupid.
And we're doing it again.
And we're also talking about Vladimir Putin using this russophobic Boris Badenov and Natasha lunacy.
And we're this close to perhaps a nuclear confrontation.
even possible?
Oh, yeah, absolutely it's possible.
I think things have changed profoundly.
I would say the vast majority of our instructors had at least one, usually two tours of duty in Vietnam.
Many of them were decorated combat veterans, decorated for valor.
They were intelligent people.
They'd all been to graduate school.
They were overwhelmingly graduates.
They had a deep interest in West Point and what happened there.
And of course, at that time, remember, we were all men.
That makes a huge difference to the chemistry in your classrooms and what happens on the playing fields and everything you do.
Men are much harder on men than they are on men and women.
And these men were very honest with us.
And several of us, several times, you know, I remember more than one time when the instructor would say, all right, that's it for what we're discussing today, whether it was mathematics, chemistry, engineering, physics, whatever.
We had an awful lot of math and science in my day, which interested me very little, but I survived it.
And they would stop and they would say, well, let's talk about X. And people would raise their hands and say, sir, you were in Vietnam.
We don't really know what's happening over there.
None of us have been there.
Can you tell us something about it?
And I would tell you, Lionel, that they were very honest.
And the vast majority of them said, I don't know what the hell we were doing over there.
It didn't make any sense.
And they said, you know, you're put in a situation as a professional soldier where you're told to go there.
You go there.
They send you into the field.
You encounter somebody that shoots at you, and so you try to kill them.
And this goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on.
And you see people on your side killed.
You see large numbers of the opponents killed.
And then you ask, what's the point?
where are we headed?
You know, my view is that, Germans looked around.
I talked to many German veterans and they would tell me, you know, once you went east of Kiev, there was nothing there.
There's nothing out there.
Vast open spaces, steppes, dense forests, some Russians, and then increasingly Tartars and Mongols and Turks.
But there was nothing there.
What are we doing here?
You know, what are we trying to conquer?
There's no there there, I think, as Dorothy Barker said.
And I think that's been the problem in the United States now for a long time.
We do not develop any sort of serious strategy that addresses our real interests.
And part of that is the fact that we are planet America.
We may be on the planet, but we are our own planet.
And most Americans, as you know, Lionel, on any given day, if you live in Kansas City or you live, you know, in...
Are you worried about the Middle East?
Are you worried about Europe or anything else?
No.
You have a life where you are.
You're worried about sustaining your life, preserving your family, whatever.
Earning enough income to provide for a standard of living, send your children to school.
We can go on and on.
So places like Ukraine or Southern Lebanon or anywhere beyond the borders of the United States are sort of novel but not very interesting.
Nobody's paying much attention.
This is a killer for us.
I concluded very early on.
In fact, I heard one of my professors at West Point say this, who was an experienced soldier.
He said, I've decided that if the average American can't point to the place on a map and pronounce the name properly, we probably shouldn't go.
I can't believe you said this.
I carry this in my briefcase.
I got this at a dollar store.
And I said, here, point to Ukraine.
Roughly.
Roughly.
Just roughly.
Give me an idea.
It's either this side or this side.
Point to it.
Our end times saw somebody who had outside their office the Ukrainian flag upside down.
And I keep saying, you know, history would be a wonderful thing if only were true.
What Tolstoy said...
Everybody born in, I think it was 1921.
Now, the loss of Russia in World War II, they were our ally.
And aside from this Saving Private Ryan version of World War II, and Normandy was critical, there's no doubt about that, but...
They were our allies.
They could have beaten the Hitler...
Ever.
And that's why when FDR sent, Never our allies.
Never.
Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that he led were interested in aggrandizing the Soviet Union.
In other words, expanding it, increasing the numbers of nations that were brought under its rule.
But they were not our lives.
They fought for things that had nothing to do with what we were fighting for.
So I think we need to keep that in mind.
Now, as far as casualties are concerned, when I was in Moscow in 2001, I was still on active duty.
It was an official delegation that visited the Russian General Staff College, which was called at the time, before this time, the Voroshilov.
And the historians gave us a briefing.
The historian that talked about the Second World War to us very briefly said, well, the NKVD archives, which at that point were still open to the public, indicate that we've lost 39,900,000 and we are still counting.
Now, as this information came out, you can imagine the Russian populace was horrified.
They'd been told 20 million.
It was bad.
But now you're talking twice that number.
So Putin, who was in a very desperate situation trying to recover some measure of patriotism and love of country and everything else, shut down the NKVD archives.
He had to.
I mean, really, really, he was afraid there were going to be uprisings in the streets and so forth.
Stalin executed one million Soviet soldiers who refused to fight against the Wehrmacht.
There were millions of people who sided all over Eastern Europe with the Wehrmacht, not because they were fanatical Nazis.
It had nothing to do with it.
It's because Nazism, however much we may not like it, was infinitely preferable to communism.
We've never come to terms with that reality.
Now, I don't think Vladimir Putin is going to stand up and tell us that, but he knows the truth, and he knows what went on.
And the good news for us, which is what I stress more than anything else, is, while I wouldn't have lifted a finger, In 1941 or 42, 43, 44, to help Stalin and that slave state that he ruled over, or the slave armies that he employed, I am absolutely opposed to taking up arms under any circumstances against Russia today, because Russia today is totally divorced from that.
Let's give Putin credit for building an infinitely better society that rests on the foundation of Russian Orthodox Christian culture.
That is trying desperately to be moral?
I mean, this is the first leader in the history of the country that I can recall who bends over backwards to avoid casualties in his own forces.
Yeah, but that's because you're a Putin apologist.
This is my favorite.
Anytime you say you're a Putin apologist, what you understand is this man, he wants to spread and reunify the Soviet Union.
Don't you understand that?
You're wrong.
He wants to take Ukraine back.
Well, Lionel, you're right.
And the other sad part is that I'm treated every day to a barrage of attacks from people who said, don't you understand that China is at war with us?
They're at war with the whole world.
And I keep telling them, having been to Asia many times and Korea, if you go there, no one is afraid of China.
They don't see any evidence for any military threat from the Chinese.
They are concerned about the economy.
And they recognize they're dealing with a huge economic power, and they understand that that was true for 2,000 years.
In fact, for most of the last 2,000 years in human history, China was the wealthiest country in the world.
And they want to do business with it, and they're upset with us because we threaten them if they do business with China.
I mean, it's a strange set of circumstances.
China is too big to govern.
Anyone who thinks that Xi is Stalin is a lunatic.
He wakes up every morning hoping that he can hold the place together for another 24 hours.
That's what people don't seem to understand.
He doesn't control everything in China.
China is not Stalinist Soviet Union, by any means.
So we're stuck with false perceptions everywhere.
And the other thing is that we've lost all sense of means and ends.
In other words, we want to do things.
The first question you say is, is that attainable?
Which means, do I have the resources to do it?
Is it realistic to even try?
We don't ask those questions.
See, this is Eisenhower after World War II, scrupulously avoiding war whenever he possibly could.
That's why he went to Korea and said it's over.
There's a very famous incident where he never promised, as Trump said, I could end this war in 24 hours.
I'll pick up the phone and it'll be over.
He never said that when he ran for office.
All he said when people said, are you going to end the war?
He said, I promise that if I am elected, I will go to Korea.
That's what he said.
Very smart.
So I went to Korea, and at the time, Mark Clark had been appointed the Supreme Commander of all the forces on the peninsula.
Mark Clark delivered a briefing, and he said, with 835,000 men in the 8th Army, I know I can march into Manchuria.
The Chinese.
And Eisenhower was polite.
He said, thank you very much, General.
He got up and he walked outside.
He turned to Goodbaster, who was his military aide, and he said, this is lunacy.
The American people are not interested in going to war in China.
He said, we don't know what China will be in the future.
At some point, we may want to do business with them.
But he said, right now, forget it.
It's out of its own position.
Try your best.
Help me.
What was he thinking?
Is this a military brain that is somehow reprogrammed once you're in the business?
What was he thinking, Mark Clark?
You're asking the right question, and I think I was reprogrammed, and I think he was too, but he was reprogrammed for different reasons.
If you go and look at JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon, They had one view of America, that we were all powerful, invincible, invulnerable, nothing can stand against us.
Eisenhower came out of World War II with a very different perspective.
He had been at the top.
He knew all the key players, including Soviet leaders, as well as the British, the French, everybody.
He had sat down and met with some of the German leaders.
So he knew what the war was all about.
And his lesson from World War II was, And he looked at Germany and he looked at the Soviet Union and he said, these states, these people did things that we could never do.
They could take the casualties.
They could stay in battle.
They could fight to the bitter end, whatever was required.
He said, we can't do that.
We're free people.
War is the last thing that we want to do.
Precisely.
In other words, what we're good at is building prosperity.
And he used to say the American people want security.
They also want prosperity.
So they deserve both.
And one cannot come at the expense of the other.
In other words, we cannot build huge forces for a war we never want to fight and sacrifice our prosperity while we do it.
So it has to be balanced.
But Colonel, when you have spent your life becoming a professional soldier, And you have learned the art of war.
And you say, great, now here's your degree, here's your rank, but don't ever use it.
It's like being an expert in amputation.
You're the best surgeon in the world, but don't do this.
What kind of incentive?
Isn't there parenthetically, listen, if you want to get a promotion, you better figure a way to keep this because you're a hammer, the world's a nail, and you know the expression.
Well, there's a difference between becoming a professional soldier and understanding that your ultimate mission or purpose is to destroy or kill the enemies of the American people.
There's a difference between that and then thinking carefully about the wisdom of the Right, right, right.
So my job was to go in and train, organize, and lead these troops in a way that would minimize casualties but still deliver victory.
And I understood that there was always a price to victory, and that's sacrifice.
But I was also able at the time to look above me and see people that were making the decisions.
And they were, on the whole, very disappointing.
This was a group of old generals, senior colonels who'd been in Vietnam.
Permanently traumatized by Vietnam who saw nothing like disaster in front of them and were not terribly interested in fighting.
They never took the time and the trouble to really learn anything about the enemy they faced.
And so this was an eye-opener for me.
So when this thing ended, at a point in time when I thought it should not have ended, I thought that somebody should have stood up and said, we've got to make a decision.
Do we keep this man Saddam Hussein or do we get rid of him?
If we're going to keep him, Then we need to sit down and do business with him and say, all right, war's over.
These are the conditions for continued survival of you and your relationship with us.
You know, very straightforward.
If you don't want him, then you have to move your force towards Baghdad and tell them to deliver Saddam and his inner circle or face the consequences.
Now, everybody said, oh, well, we can't do that.
You don't have to occupy anything.
You just have to make it very clear that the leadership has to go.
But we wouldn't do those things.
We did neither.
So what we did is we left it open-ended and then decided that for the next, whatever it was, at that point, 10, 12 years, we were going to bomb these people into oblivion.
We were going to kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, including large numbers of infants that were never allowed to grow.
I mean, it's just an atrocity.
So, you know, the problem you've got is this.
You've got to sit down and say, you want to use military power.
That's fine.
What's the purpose?
Tell us what the purpose is.
And then the general officers and the admirals, they have an obligation to say, well, we don't necessarily disagree with your purpose, but we may not be the right instrument.
Nobody does that.
Everybody's a yes man.
And I think...
There were a lot of thinking people because they went to Vietnam.
And they all agreed, we must never do this again.
Well, by the time we get around to Desert Storm, most of them, with a few exceptions, are gone.
And then the people that go through Desert Storm, who are shocked because of how brilliantly the army performed, which was a very different army from the one that was in Vietnam, they said, well, that's fine.
Let's go home now.
And we'll cut it down.
We'll harvest savings.
And at the same time, the political figures in Washington said, well, if this was attainable, then we can go anywhere and do this anytime we want.
And if you stood up and said, as I did, I didn't think it was a good idea for us to become involved in the Balkans.
And I made that very clear.
And I was told, well, that's interesting, but shut up and call her because we're going into the Balkans.
And I actually, in the War Plans Division of the Army staff, I actually wrote a paper.
This is before we got into the Balkans in a big way.
And this was in 94, in the fall of 94. And I wrote this paper that said the Balkans is an area of strategic importance and interest to Russia, not us.
They have a long history there.
We don't.
The Turks have an interest there.
We don't.
Perhaps the Austrians and the Germans may have an interest.
We don't.
Therefore, we should not involve ourselves.
And this is a matter for Europeans to sort through.
This is not a NATO issue because NATO itself is not under attack.
Well, that paper was accepted by the chief of staff at the time, Gordon Sullivan.
It went all the way up because my boss took me with him.
We presented the paper.
We left.
And then he came back and said, good job on the paper.
They sent it to the White House.
So you know what the White House did?
Forget it.
Now, my point is, I don't know what's going on now, but there are always people in the system who think.
Believe it or not, they're there.
And it also happens in the CIA and the national intelligence structure.
But if they provide the wrong answer to the political leadership, they're removed or replaced.
And someone else is found in uniform who's prepared to do what they want.
And that's where we are now.
Colonel, let's play a thought experiment.
If I were to change the realities, if I were to nationalize the military-industrial complex, let's just assume you make no money.
You want to go to war?
Fine.
Nobody makes it.
There's no Raytheon, no General Dynamics, no nothing.
Would the world look different?
What is their motivation?
Is it money to be on the board?
Is it this?
Is it power?
Is it some PNAC game of risk?
Is this some megalomaniacal?
What is Lindsey Graham about?
Help me with this.
Maybe I'll understand it.
Remember after PNAC and the neocons and the Straussian lunatics?
What is it?
Explain this to me.
Maybe I'm missing.
Maybe I'm just stupid.
No, no, you're obviously not.
First of all, we have to understand that the five big defense firms are, for all practical purposes, what you just described.
We call them state-sponsored enterprises.
They are so big and they are so vital to the larger GNP, GDP, because military equipment and technology is almost all that's left that we build.
If you were watching just last week, I think it was Howard Lutnick was asked by an Indian at a conference with Indian businessmen and representatives of the Indian government, why are you not happy with us?
And he made the comment, well, we'd be a lot happier with you if you bought our military equipment instead of Russian military equipment.
Stop and think about that.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, this is this absurdity of transactional relations with people.
Suddenly, it's the New York City way of business.
Everything's about money, and either you pay me or you don't.
If you don't pay me, then you're out.
And I think that's one problem.
The second problem, though, that you asked about.
Is somebody like Lindsey Graham.
First of all, I've met him once or twice, had a brief conversation with him.
I don't know what he really believes, but I do know what's important to him.
And what's important to him is staying in office and wielding power and influence.
He cannot do that without a great deal of money.
And when McCain died, he inherited the wealthy people, bankers and others in San Francisco that had bankrolled McCain for so long.
Who are these people and what do they want?
Well, they're all Zionists.
That's number one.
So you're committed, if you're going to take their money, you're absolutely committed to war in perpetuity to make Israel the hegemonic power in the region.
I mean, let's face it.
Boy, now you've got it.
Now you've hit that third rail, McGregor.
Here we go!
You know, before you go any further, I just tell you, I've been to Israel many times, and I actually like the Israelis.
I've been twice.
I loved it.
Loved the people.
Loved it.
Yes.
I started going there in 99. My last visit was 2020.
And I talked to Israelis.
Some of them were IDF officers or retired.
And some of them expressed to you, said, don't you think we'd be better off without this close relationship and dependence upon the United States?
And I sort of sat there and I said, well, you know, that's the call you need to make.
Can you make it on your own?
That was my answer.
But if you're going to do that, then you have to get along with your neighbors.
And that's something they don't want to do.
They want to bully their neighbors.
They don't want to get along with them.
And that's a problem.
And we enable that because of our unconditional support.
So people say, why can't we bring about peace in Gaza or something else?
Well, The only leverage we have is to cut them off.
Cold turkey refused to supply anything else.
We don't want to do that because, first of all, we don't hate Israelis.
We think Israel has a positive role to play.
I do.
So you don't want to cut them off.
then what do you do?
No one can stand up to that anymore because today, if you sit down president Trump and you sit down, And how many senators can you deliver on a vote?
Netanyahu can deliver more than Trump.
Those are facts.
These are, don't you think most people, Colonel, would be offended, irrespective of the cause, for anybody to be in the position of having I have no problem with AIPAC.
We have a Second Amendment lobby and climate change.
I don't care about that.
I'm sure we have lobbies in other countries as well.
But this obeisance, this almost like this zombified obeisance, but the one that gets me the most.
Look, we can argue this all day long, but I'll be damned if you're going to tell me that I can go to Columbia University, blaspheme my beloved republic, and get away with it, in fact, be patted on the back.
But if I dare say something about Israel, I'm going to be booted as being an anti-Semite?
Wait a minute.
What?
Whose country is that?
I can't believe...
Israel is about a country.
Am I a Francophone if I don't like Macron?
And finally, both sides left to right are saying the same thing.
When CNN and Fox agree, something's very wrong here.
Well, money speaks.
Money has a unique flavor all of its own.
You sound like AOC with the Benjamins.
Yeah, well, I think I'm not a big AOC fan, obviously.
I didn't think so.
But having said that, I think we need to understand that this – Mark Twain was asked many years ago by a visitor from Europe.
He said, what about criminality in the United States?
And he said, the only entirely criminal class in the United States is Congress.
I think he got it right.
And I think that's where we are.
Too many of these people have sold out.
Let me finish, Lionel.
This is based on two things.
Not just greed, but it's also based on the assumption that it doesn't matter.
We're so powerful.
We're so big.
We can do whatever we want.
And if we decide to do something which may be antithetical to our interests, such as support mass murder and expulsion of people from Gaza, it doesn't matter.
Who the hell could stop us?
You know, we're going to continue to make money and continue to do business.
And eventually the people there will be gone and no one will remember or care.
I mean, literally, that's the mentality.
Don't ask me to stick my head out for something that really doesn't matter.
And my constituents, by the way, they don't even know where it is or the ones who do are evangelicals who thinks this is God's will.
Right.
So, you know, I think it's a combination of those things.
It's not just one factor.
Right.
Right.
I understand.
It's kind of an eschatological aspect.
The thing which I also want to find, I was a little young at the time.
I'm from Florida originally, and I lived in Tampa, where we have MacDill Air Force Base before it was CENCOM, and we really kind of knew about those Ruskies in Cuba and the whole bit.
But in 1962, if I recall correctly, there was a thing called the Cuban Missile.
And plus, we have the Monroe Doctrine.
And we told Russia, and that's it.
It was actually about Turkey, but anyway.
We theoretically said, we will go to war with you if you don't get these missiles out of something that's 90 miles away.
Vladimir Putin basically says, since day one, Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO.
That's it.
He even meets Zelensky.
Boris Johnson comes in and puts a kibosh to that.
How can we tell anybody that they can't do what we did in 1962 and we're ready to go to war for?
Do we just not remember?
Are we hypocrites or just crazy?
Well, we're the ones that wear the white hats.
We're always good guys.
This is the problem.
Americans don't understand that in many cases we're not the good guys.
We certainly weren't the good guys in Vietnam.
And I don't think we're the good guys right now in the Middle East and many other places.
It used to be enormously popular.
And that was because we weren't occupying anything.
You know, if you look in the Arab world and you look for countries where they've done polling, where are we most popular?
We're most popular in those countries where we have no forces.
80 countries with 750 bases.
How do we...
Well, this is a legacy of the Cold War.
And back in 1991-92, and when I got to the War Plans Division, there were discussions then, where do we pull back?
And remember that people on the Hill talked about the, what was it, the payoff for reductions in the armed forces, the dividend, the peace dividend?
Well, the peace dividend went as follows.
After 1991, out of an army at that time of almost $800,000, $750,000, we immediately, Pulled the plug on 163,000 soldiers who were combat experienced.
We encouraged them to leave.
We paid them to go.
And so this force of 750,000 went down to 450,000 ultimately.
Not initially.
It went down to about 500.
Then it went to 495.
And I remember when all of this happened, we looked at it and said, well, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Shouldn't we keep people that were in action?
Shouldn't we hold together formations that were effective?
You know, why are we simply liquidating formations instead of looking carefully?
Well, these were very good.
Maybe these weren't so good.
And there was none of that.
It was just we're cutting, cutting, cutting.
However, we didn't cut any general officer slots.
We didn't cut any admiral slots.
And so you ended up with this very top-heavy structure.
And I wrote a paper.
It's about 8,000 words long.
If you want, I can send it to you on email.
Please.
I wrote it at RFK Jr.'s request, and it was called Taming the War State.
And the whole idea, Warfare State, the whole idea was you need a new strategy.
We're in a new world.
We don't live in the old world anymore.
And we have this enormous problem with indebtedness, which is only going to grow worse.
We're going to have to cut military spending by 50%.
We're going to have to go after the, what do they call them, the entitlements by some percentage at some point.
So we have to have a strategy to shed these overseas commitments, change the way we think, and by the way, warfare has changed.
So the forces we've got are not necessarily the right ones anyway, which is okay.
We just need to get out of the business of conflict right now and sort ourselves out.
That was very well received.
It went to all the people in the Trump administration.
I know President Trump didn't read it, but I know Don Jr. did.
And everybody liked it.
Tulsi Gabbard said this is the right thing.
And when I say everybody, the people concerned with national security, it went nowhere.
And now we now have a budget for over a trillion dollars.
We have now extended all the policies that were in place under Biden.
And so President Trump is very concerned about optics.
And he knows most people don't look at what's happening overseas.
Secondly, they don't really fathom indebtedness.
You know, yesterday it was brought to my attention that Fannie Mac and, what is it, Fannie Mae, they have what they call agency debt.
Seven to eight trillion dollars of debt in that organizational construct.
Isn't Doge going to fix that?
It's not included.
In the national sovereign debt.
But it exists.
They call it agency debt because most of the debt is held privately overseas as well as here.
So they It's debt.
So add that 8 and 6 is 14. Last time I asked, what?
44 million?
That's insane.
But we're not going to worry about that because we can print money.
And then at the same time, President Trump turns around and says, Well, you and I know that the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, nobody that I'm aware of came to the United States and said, follow me, we're taking the industry and your jobs away.
That didn't happen.
The people that were the CEOs, the shareholders, sold everybody out.
So if you're going to go after somebody, go after the shareholders.
Now he wants to tax foreign capital.
We can't survive, given our current financial position, if we tax foreign capital in the United States.
We need to attract foreign capital, not drive it away.
So all over the world, China, not just China, but Asia in general, the Middle East, Europe, South America, people are saying, wait a minute, these people are nuts.
We better get our cash out.
Well, that's the worst thing that could happen to us.
They pull out their investments, their cash.
And the answer is they can't do that because there's nowhere else for them to go.
What planet are we on?
This is not 1955.
This is not 1988.
This is 2025.
Yeah, there are a lot of places they can go with that cash.
And they can do very well.
So we're kind of living in a dream world in Washington right now.
You know, just by the way, you must be getting a complex.
By the way, if you want a story to die, give McGregor a paper.
He'll write it and he'll die.
Some of your best stuff, we're going to have this library called Great Thoughts.
But in the waning minute, and I thank you so much, sir, for your time and your eloquence and your genius, I want you to imagine hypothetically, I'm President Trump.
You sit down and I say, all right, McGregor, tell me what to do.
I'll do it.
Name it.
Give me one thing, two things, five.
Name it.
I'm writing it down.
No questions asked.
What do I do?
Number one, inform all of your overseas allies that you are going to withdraw all of the ground forces over the next 24 to 36 months.
You would like their preferences for how to do this.
In other words, if you go to South Korea and say, I want to pull all the troops out, they're going to say, wait a minute, when, how?
Because, of course, our presence means income for them.
Same thing in Germany.
Same thing in Italy.
So you turn to your friends, your allies, and say, we're going to do this.
We want to put a plan together.
We're consulting with you.
We're going to do it one way or the other.
That's not open for discussion.
And out of the 800-plus bases, we're going to cut that in half.
We're going to go down to about 400 or less because we don't need them anymore.
We don't need to man them anymore.
So we're going to meet with you and discuss how to do this.
But we're getting out.
And eventually, we're going to cut way back on our so-called overseas presence.
This is air and naval.
And why would you do that?
Because today, precision guided munitions, new air defense technology, new technology at sea means if you've got a lot of things forward and you do end up in a conflict, you'll lose them immediately.
It'll be a hell of a lot worse than Pearl Harbor.
The world has changed.
So, friends, you're going to have to be your own first responders.
And don't bet on a repetition of Normandy, because if we try to move hundreds of thousands of troops across the Atlantic and the Pacific, they're going to be sunk.
Is that for all countries?
All countries, Governor?
Yeah.
You just have to tell them, look, you're going to have to defend yourselves.
We'll help you to the extent that we can, but we cannot do what has happened in the past because technology has changed, and of course, we have economic constraints.
So that's number one.
All right.
Number two, I think is, Now, why?
Because that's what happened after the stock market crash in 29. And Herbert Hoover turned to the Army and said, we've got to deport people.
We deported 9 million Mexicans.
Now, we did not deport them because we didn't like them.
That had nothing to do with it.
And in those days, it wasn't anything to do with criminality.
The reason was very simple.
People were losing jobs.
We're going into a depression.
People that are not Americans are holding jobs that normally Americans would not do.
But when it becomes clear that they need the money, you're damn right, they're going to do it.
And I don't want these people punished or threatened or harmed because they're now doing jobs that Americans need.
So that's what we did.
We did another $3.5 million under FDR, another $2.1 million under Truman.
Another $1.4, $1.3 million under Eisenhower.
It was not personal.
It was for the reasons I just outlined.
Remember that Eisenhower spent all of his time trying to contract the budget because we were heavily in debt.
And the people in the Pentagon hated Eisenhower because he kept slashing the military budget.
You know, Kennedy comes in in 1960 and he promises a giant army, which Eisenhower felt was not a good idea.
And his reason he felt that way is he didn't want the army used overseas again on the scale of World War II.
Well, what did we do with this giant army that we built for use against the Soviets in Europe?
We sent it to Vietnam.
Catastrophe.
So I guess what I'm saying is that those two things are very, very important.
And, you know, if you can do those things, then I think the third thing is that you're going to have to address entitlements.
You're going to have to come clean with the American people.
Everybody is not going to get the Social Security that they were promised.
We're going to have to come up with another way.
So if you're over the age of 60 or 50 or 70, whatever they decide to do, you get your Social Security payments.
All the rest of you people, uh-uh.
It's not coming, and we're going to have to do something else.
And we've got to come up with a different way to provide medical care, health care.
You know, a friend of mine is Finnish, and he's lived here for years.
And he said to me, He said, why is it that the people in Finland or Sweden or Denmark or Germany or any of these places can provide pretty good health care, excellent health care, and they spend a fraction of what we do?
I said, well, I don't know.
And we're back to your friend Elon and Doge.
And, of course, Elon was about as popular as the plague, as we all know.
Remember, if you go to the Hill in Washington, and I've done this, and I've said to Senator Connors, well, what do you do here?
And they look at you and smile and say, we spend money.
I mean, that's what they do.
Precisely.
And if they don't spend money, they don't profit.
They don't get contributions.
They don't get rich.
Do they need to spend all that money?
Well, their constituents demand it.
If I tell my constituents I'm eliminating this base or I'm eliminating this subsidy, then I'm going to be out of office.
Well, I'm sorry, but it has to happen.
This is what happens when you have large nation-states of any kind, regardless of the governmental form, and eventually what do you end up with?
You end up with Caesar or Bonaparte.
Bonaparte took over, and what's the first thing that Bonaparte did when he finally became the first consul in France?
He said, the revolution is over.
And then he said, oh, thank God the revolution is over.
Nobody could do it.
This is what happens.
You end up with an authoritarian leader who does all of the things that can otherwise not be done.
And I'm afraid that's the direction in which our country is headed.
At some point, all of the noise has to stop.
I mean, Otto Hitler was not wildly popular.
He only had about a third of the electorate behind him.
But when he took over and he ended all of the fights in the streets.
When he crushed all the criminal activity, shut down the drugs in Berlin, shut down the houses of prostitution, everybody said, well, thank God.
I think that's where we're at.
Colonel McGregor, if there is a God, if there is some form of justice, you will run for something.
I will pledge...
I had to ask.
You're not going to run for anything except the men's room.
Well, listen, I want to thank you, sir.
I want to thank you for your wisdom.
Thank you for your genius.
You have done more.
Do you understand?
I'm going to leave you with this.
Do you have any idea of what you have done, sir?
At long last, this is the opposite of the McCarthy thing.
At long last, do you know how popular, how you have invigorated and enlivened and focused an entire generation of people who would have never listened to any of this stuff?
You are sui generis.
There is nobody like you.
I'm sorry.
The platitudes, you must listen to me.
I can't thank you enough.
You are one of a kind, my friend.
And it is an honor.
Please, please allow me to speak again after you've...
Just save your time.
No more papers.
But thank you so much, sir.
Okay.
Thank you, Lionel.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you, sir.
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